Distributed password cracking with Medussa
Medussa is a password cracking application that supports distributed processing. One node acts as the Medussa server and the rest of the nodes are running the client application. The server node, in addition to running decryption, also distributes the workload among all participating nodes. Below is brief installation and configuration manual for running Medussa under Linux.
Downloading Software
You can download Medussa source code from the developer’s site: http://www.bastard.net/~kos/medussa/
Save the medussa-0.8.tar.gz to /opt/medussa
cd /opt/medussa gzip -d medussa-0.8.tar.gz tar xvf medussa-0.8.tar.gz cd /opt/medussa/medussa-0.8
Installing Server
To compile Medussa you will need the current version of gcc compiler. From /opt/medussa/medussa-0.8 do the following:
./configure ./make ./make install
Configuring Server
In /opt/medussa/medussa-0.8 create a hidden file called .medussarc. The file should contain the following:
# # Basics # verbose 1 adminpassword your_pass motd Medussa
Set permissions on .medussarc to 700.
Create a file /etc/init.d/medussa with the following contents:
#!/bin/bash ps -ef | egrep "medussa|tentacle" | egrep -v egrep | awk '{print $2}' | while read PID do kill -9 $PID done cd /opt/medussa/medussa-0.8/ /usr/local/bin/medussa -d -f .medussarc /usr/local/bin/tentacle -v0 &
Medussa will only read the .medussarc file from the current working directory, so it’s important to cd to where this file is located rather than provide the full path to the file.
Set permissions:
chmod 755 /etc/init.d/medussa
Run /etc/init.d/medussa This will start Medussa server and a single client thread.
Installing Client
On each client node run the following script to download the source tarball from the server node, untar, compile, install, add startup scripts, and run. Substitute “head_node” and “root_pass” with the name of your Medussa server and the root password on that server.
#!/bin/bash MSERVER="head_node" FTPUSER="root" FTPPASS="root_pass" HOMEDIR="/opt/medussa" TARBALL="medussa-0.8.tar" if [ ! -d $HOMEDIR ] then mkdir $HOMEDIR chmod 700 $HOMEDIR else echo "Directory $HOMEDIR already exists. Exiting..." exit 1 fi ftp -in $MSERVER << END user $FTPUSER $FTPPASS cd /opt/medussa lcd /opt/medussa get medussa-0.8.tar END cd "$HOMEDIR" tar xvf "$TARBALL" rm "$TARBALL" cd * ./configure make make install echo "/usr/local/bin/tentacle -v0 -s $MSERVER &" > /etc/init.d/tentacle chmod 755 /etc/init.d/tentacle /etc/init.d/tentacle
Example cracking session
On the Medussa server type mecon to access the Medussa console and enter commands as shown to crack a single Unix password hash.
[root@medussa]# mecon mecon> o Implementation 0.8 [i686-pc-linux-gnu], ready and willing mecon@localhost>admin your_pass mecon@localhost>add hash username1 unixcrypt vvme8ohnOyMOI mecon@localhost>add schedule username1 bruteforce poss=abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz1234567890,maxlen=7 mecon@localhost>show nodes node cps start time total time current slice medussa2 R 70000 2006/05/10 13:52 0:00:00:01 210000:1210000 medussa3 R 70000 2006/05/10 13:52 0:00:00:01 1210000:2210000 medussa4 R 70000 2006/05/10 13:52 0:00:00:01 2700000:3700000 medussa5 R 70000 2006/05/10 13:52 0:00:00:01 3770000:4770000 medussa6 R 70000 2006/05/10 13:52 0:00:00:01 4770000:5770000 mecon@localhost>stat eta: 0:13:49:17 percent: 0.055 totalcps: 1619045
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